


Swollen Knuckles and Skinned Knees: the Love Story

by togina



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angst to Fluff, Canon Divergence, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 10:03:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4701983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sure, they had been inseparable.  But Steve didn't think it had been in quite the way that the Smithsonian meant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Swollen Knuckles and Skinned Knees: the Love Story

**Author's Note:**

> I have no real explanation for this. It stemmed, as things seem to, from me thinking, "What if that 'best friends since childhood,' is just the museum version of the story?" and spiraled down from there.
> 
> Set post CA:TWS, but since I haven't seen AOU, there shouldn't be any spoilers for that. This is not beta'ed, so I'm the only one to be blamed. Skeezy adult in the Barnes's household, for a bit, but he goes away.

Steve woke up at 0309. He rolled out of bed into a crouch on the floor, nearly tangling himself in the blankets Sam insisted on trapping him under. When a quick scan of Sam’s guest room indicated that nothing had crept in—or drifted in, like last week’s toxic fog—Steve unfolded to his full, serum-enhanced height, stretching until his back popped and fumbling for his shirt.

Steve only woke up in the middle of the night for two reasons, after all. One was imminent death. The other had left his side of the guest bed cold.

He ran toward the museum, because after the first three times Sam’s neighbors had complained that he was running a motorcycle gang with no respect for a good night’s sleep. Sam, in turn, had stolen Steve’s keys. Steve had hot-wired the bike, and Bucky had found the keys inside Sam’s pillow – while Sam was sleeping on it. Still, Steve didn’t want to offend their host. And he’d seen his Ma stumble off the trolley in the dark, her feet swollen from the twelve-hour day and her eyes drifting shut over her soup bowl, only to wake before dawn the next day and do it all over again. He had a great deal of respect for a good night’s sleep.

He just hadn’t gotten one in almost six years.

The first night that Steve had woken up to find Bucky gone, he’d panicked. Dragged Sam out of bed and into his wings, woke up Pepper to beg her to let Tony hack DC’s police cameras, debated calling Nat and Sharon to get more eyes on the ground.

Pepper—who was infinitely kinder than Tony, and didn’t create a variety of helicarriers and robots that wanted to kill everyone—tried to allay Steve’s embarrassment when the cameras indicated that Bucky was sitting quietly in the video room of the Captain America exhibit and not on a freighter to outer Rhodesia. Then she pointed out that Rhodesia was no longer a country, despite what Tony kept telling him about the USSR and the African colonies.

When Steve had broken several speed limits to reach the Smithsonian, that first night, Bucky had ignored him. Which was normal, and normal was good, whether Steve wanted it to be or not. So Steve had settled onto the bench beside Bucky and watched himself laugh in those carefree moments when it had finally all come together, before it had all fallen apart.

Sometime during the reel’s eighth run, cool fingers had curled over Steve’s forearm. When he glanced over, Bucky had continued watching the film, acting for all the world as though Steve weren’t even there. But his index finger lifted just slightly, and then came down on the suddenly sensitive skin of Steve’s arm. And again.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Steve frowned, staring at Bucky’s restless hand. Tap. tap-Tap.

Thankfully Steve’s brain had remembered more than the names of countries in 1945, and immediately translated the erratic tapping.

_Dah-dah-dah. Dah-di-dah._

O. K.

“I’m glad,” Steve whispered, still waiting for the night watchman to catch them on his rounds.

Bucky had frowned, squeezed Steve’s arm, then begun again. _Dah-dah-dah. Dah-di-dah._ Steve had watched the pale finger press into his skin, leaving momentary white marks that faded too quickly, the fleeting touch of a ghost. _Dah-dah-dah. Dah-di-dah._

“Oh,” Steve had breathed, when Bucky had grown impatient enough to turn and look directly at his friend. “I’m – yes, I’m okay. I was just worried,” he admitted, because the Winter Soldier had been trained to hear Steve’s rapid pulse and to measure the nervous sweat drying on his brow. “I didn’t know where you were.”

Bucky had raised an eyebrow, at that. Steve had spent most of their lives wondering where Bucky was, and had failed to find him too many times.

Once was one time too many, when layered on the infinite failures in all Steve’s dreams.

* * *

By now, Steve could keep his pulse in a normal range, and the only sweat he worked up was from his crosstown jog. Bucky was almost always watching their old footage, but sometimes Steve would find him staring blankly at his own period uniform, or at the fiberglass shield the Smithsonian had made. Steve didn’t like to look at Bucky’s mannequin: all the other Commandos wore helmets—the more suicidal of them wore hats—that protected their faceless doppelgangers from the enemy, or from Steve’s gaze. Bucky’s double was nothing but smooth, inhuman grey, untouchable, yet too fragile all the same, the terrible, delicate weave of a burying shroud.

Tonight, Bucky was standing in front of his official biography, scowling at the onyx glass. If Steve ignored the lines of tension around Bucky’s mouth and the grey, haunted depths in his eyes, the man beside him looked almost like the face etched into the glass.

He hadn’t spoken for weeks, after they found him, except to ask for a razor. When Steve had panicked, Bucky had handed over razor, towel, strap and scissors without a word.

And really, if Steve had to choose, he would take Bucky’s unconditional trust over his conversation any day of the week.

Though he wished that, if Bucky intended to stand in silence, the damned museum voice could shut up as well.

_The story of Captain America is one of honor, bravery, and sacrifice._

“What’s wrong, Buck?” Steve wondered, edging into Bucky’s personal space. “You don’t like having your ugly mug out there for everyone to see?”

Oddly, this was the exhibit that bothered Steve the least. Probably because it was so utterly, absurdly incorrect that he’d almost burst out laughing during the opening ceremony.

_Denied enlistment due to poor health, Steven Rogers was chosen for a program unique in the annals of American warfare._

Bucky’s scowl seemed to deepen at those words, and that, at least, was familiar. “I know,” Steve agreed, unable to mask his surprise when Bucky swung around to face him. Bucky didn’t like to look anyone in the eyes. “I volunteered, nobody chose me. This whole exhibit is more outrageous than half of Howard’s designs.”

_One that would transform him into the world’s first super soldier._

The world’s _only_ super soldier, they had thought, until the Winter Soldier came.

Bucky pursed his lips, considering, then tapped on the glass with his life story. Steve snorted. “You were born in 1918, same as me. They didn’t even try to get that one right.” They must have looked at the 1930 census, where—by age 11—Bucky had gleefully lied through his teeth. “And if you were the oldest of four, you came from a litter of billy goats. Becky was bossy and seemed to have eyes everywhere, but there was only one of her, just the same. And she _was_ born in 1916, so you’re still not older than her, because she was harassing me at Sunday dinner every week until the cancer got her last year.”

Steve swallowed the lump in his throat, thinking of the great-great-grandmother, four feet tall and brittle as parchment in his arms when he’d drive up to the nursing home every weekend he had free. Thinking of Becky as he remembered her, sixteen and fierce, dark hair curling out of her careful braids- hauling back and punching Eugene Housman right in the nose when he’d pulled her hair, her jaw set and her unbloodied hand brushing daintily at the lace she’d sewn onto her secondhand clothes.

Bucky’s hand curled around his wrist, tapping a steady refrain. “I’m fine,” Steve croaked, and scrubbed his free hand over his eyes.

_Battle tested, Captain America and his Howling Commandos quickly earned their stripes._

“We didn’t exactly have any school sports, so I don’t know what sort of athlete you were,” Steve admitted. He didn’t know a lot of things he should, about James Buchanan Barnes. “And you weren’t in my class, after the time I had scarlet fever and it put me a year behind, but I never saw your name in a display case, and you didn’t bother with any classes after tenth grade, just like most of the other boys.”

“I played shortstop,” came the soft rejoinder, and Steve choked on his own air. “And something with running – shoving? And a ball.” This time, Bucky’s frown telegraphed his confusion, and Steve had to pull away and fold his arms to keep from suffocating his best friend in a hug.

It had been weeks since Bucky had spoken, months since he’d done more than apologize when he thought he was in the way.

“Rugby,” Steve suggested. “Or football. Everyone’s father had their own game, ‘from the old country,’” he mimicked, shaking his fist like Donnie’s _nonno_ , who’d died the day Mayor LaGuardia was sworn in, his heart too old for so many triumphant toasts. “We could never figure out the rules, so we all kicked and hit and tackled each other without remembering the ball.”

_Their mission, taking down Hydra, the Nazi rogue science division._

“I remember.” Bucky paused, and Steve wished he’d brought his phone, to record every hesitant word. “Wisconsin. And snow. But not. . .” He trailed off, losing the words, and gestured at his memorial.

“Enlisting?” Steve guessed. “That’s because you didn’t. You were drafted a month _before_ Pearl Harbor, when no one in America wanted to sign up for the war. Went to Basic in Jersey, same as I did a year later. They shipped you off to Wisconsin _after_ Pearl Harbor for sniper training, since by then they had more grunts enlisting than they could take.”

Steve was never, ever reading another history book. He’d wait for Lysander to pop out of the ice to learn what had really happened in the Peloponnesian Wars, since everything written after was obviously wrong.

 _Best friends since childhood –_ Bucky mouthed the words along with the faceless narrator, watching closely for the flinch Steve couldn’t hide. – _Bucky Barnes and Steven Rogers were inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield. Barnes is the only Howling Commando to give his life in service to his country._

Trained into stillness, molded for action, Bucky’s shift between the two never failed to startle Steve with its unnatural speed. His friend went from slouching, as easy as he ever looked, to slamming his metal fist into his own naive reflection.

“I should remember,” he snapped, pulling his arm free from the jagged crack in the glass wall. He wouldn’t look at Steve. “‘Best friends since childhood,’” he echoed, grinding the words between his teeth. “It is – this is all that I am, all that they _want_ , and I – I don’t . . .”

Steve caught Bucky’s fist before it could knock the exhibit over completely, huffing a little under the force of admantium and frustration. He swallowed hard, steeling himself, but couldn’t meet Bucky’s eyes.

“You can’t remember it because it’s not true,” Steve burst out, clinging to Bucky’s elbow when his friend tried to twist away. Bucky bared his teeth and growled, but Steve had taken worse from the Winter Soldier, and stood his ground. “It’s _not true_ , Buck,” he insisted. “And it’s not all that you are. It’s not any of you, until the war.”

Something in Steve’s voice must have sunk in, since Bucky stopped trying to break Captain America’s wrists in his haste to escape. “No,” he stated, shaking his head to emphasize the word, reaching up to brush a hand through hair that no longer hid his face. “You’re wrong. That’s – wrong.”

“Let’s go get some chocolate milk,” Steve sighed, because he didn’t want to add to the destruction they’d already caused. Because Bucky really liked chocolate milk—had always liked chocolate milk, though with less ferocity, before the war—and if Steve was going to tell this story, he would need a cherry pie and a thermos of coffee to see it through.

* * *

The diner was thankfully quiet, the few early morning patrons still bleary eyed and wishing for bed. They took the corner booth, curved so that they could watch all the exits and each other at the same time. Bucky did something to his straw that made it shorter and disturbingly pointy, then swapped his straw for Steve’s when the milk came.

“Thanks,” Steve mumbled into his coffee, not quite certain if Bucky was offering him protection or fucking with him like he’d used to. _Like he’d used to, before they were friends._

“Tell me,” Bucky said, barely audible over the clanging pans and the bacon spitting on the grill. _Ok?_ he tapped, on the back of Steve’s hand, and Steve forced out a nod.

“You showed up to first grade a week late,” Steve said, stabbing his fork into the crust of his pie. The museum was better at this. The narrator didn’t snicker when he called Steve a hero, or scream when he relived Bucky’s fall. “You had a black eye, and your left wrist was in a sling.” Bucky’s face had been violet and vomit green, red streaks around a pale eye. The sling was obviously an old shirt, inexpertly tied.

“Clumsy, Becky told the teacher, when she brought you in,” Steve continued, his stomach threatening to send the pie right back up again. “Trouble, the teacher said, and stuck you in the back with the MacPherson boys and Tommy Morley, who’d never met a kid he wouldn’t beat.”

“Trouble?” Bucky echoed, vulnerable under the streak of chocolate milk over his lip. He stared at Steve’s face, where the bruises had already faded and gone, and at the metal hand which had dealt them.

“Not true,” Steve reassured him, shaking his head. “Becky thought it would be safer, at your Aunt Mary’s, until the swelling had gone down so you could see. It wasn’t your fault you’d missed a few days of school.”

“Where did you sit?” Bucky wondered, losing his stutter the more that he spoke. The more his interest grew, upon hearing the story of his life.

“In the front.” Steve rolled his eyes. “I _was_ trouble, and Sister Frances knew it. She kept me in the front row so I couldn’t pick any fights, and in the corner by the door, so it was easier to get to the nurse before I puked everywhere.”

Bucky wrinkled his nose. “I remember that,” he muttered. “We opened all the windows, and it smelled like sick and sooty snow.”

“True,” Steve confirmed, hiding the twist of his smile in his coffee. “Sadly, very true. Dorothy Ann caught pneumonia and wouldn’t speak to me for years after that.”

“And we met on the . . . playground?” Bucky asked, clearly pulling the word from the panel he had shattered, and not from his memories.

Steve shook his head, and fiddled with the shiv Bucky had made him. “You could say that, I guess. The MacPherson cousins were sniffing around you, still trying to decide whether you’d be a better ally or a midday snack. And I – I didn’t help matters much,” he finished softly, sliding his hands into his hair and pulling.

They had been five, in first grade, mothers too busy to keep them at home another year. If Steve had done something different, that first day, maybe they would have had the fairytale friendship on the museum’s screens. If they’d been friends, maybe Steve would have moved fast enough to save Bucky’s life.

“You wanted to,” Bucky rebutted, sounding certain despite the quicksand of his mind. He waved the waitress over for more chocolate milk, and didn’t flinch when she touched his hand as she took the empty glass away.

“Maybe,” Steve allowed, because he was supposed to be telling Bucky the truth. “But it still didn’t help. I came running over, telling you that wasn’t the right way to tie a sling, and I could sew better than that, Ma had taught me, and I could show you, if you wanted, so you could fix the hem on your shorts.” Bucky forced Steve to stop tugging on his hair, pulling his hands away. “One breath, and I’d managed to insult your clothes, imply that your parents were poor and your Ma wasn’t minding your hems like she should, and that I could help you be a better _girl_.”

“That’s what I said,” Bucky filled in, still loosely holding Steve’s wrists. “I called you a pansy, and said you should sew yourself a dress, if you wanted to be such a girl.”

“The MacPhersons wanted blood,” Steve said, remembering the boys like the giants they had been to an undersized kid with asthma and a crooked spine. “They’d have jumped you if you’d said anything else.”

“So I let them jump you instead,” Bucky finished, refusing to look up when the waitress sidled back over with a fresh glass of milk.

Steve exhaled loudly. “Oh, they’d have done that anyway,” he promised. “I was their favorite sport. It was your first day, and you were trying to protect yourself, and I got in the way. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I let them hurt you.” Bucky had hunched in on himself, tapping metal fingers against the crook of his right arm. “Your nose bled.”

So had his lip, and the scrapes reopened on his knees, but that was just another day in scrawny Steve Rogers’s life. That small, stupid kid hadn’t known what he was losing that day, when James Buchanan Barnes turned and walked away. If he had, maybe he wouldn’t have called the other boy a coward as he watched him go.  Maybe he would have begged him to stay.

“And then?” Bucky whispered, as though he didn’t want to hear what happened next.

Steve shrugged. “Nothing, more or less. You ran with Morley’s crowd, as long as they didn’t get too rough, and our paths never really crossed after that. We passed each other in the neighborhood, sometimes, or sat in the same pew at mass, but we were never friends. We weren’t anything at all, until the war.”

“No,” Bucky murmured, shaking his head hard enough to blur the lines of his face. “No,” he said again, louder. Firm. “That’s not right. That’s not all.”

“Then what else was there?” Steve inquired, dragging his fork through the mangled remains of his pie. Bucky had gone to the Smithsonian too many times, if he thought they’d been anything more.

“Uncle Joe,” Bucky said, his voice far too calm to contain those words. Steve jerked back, hit with the sharp point of a memory he’d wanted frozen and gone. “Becky and I lived with Uncle Joe and Aunt Alice, when Da – went away, and Mam couldn’t bear the strain. You got rid of Uncle Joe.”

Steve tried to uncurl his fists. “He _hit_ you,” he growled, sounding angrier than he normally let Bucky hear. “He was six feet tall and worked at the rail yards and you were a little boy and he hit you.”

“I mouthed off,” Bucky replied, and Steve could hear decades of torture in those words, could taste acid in the back of his throat.

“You mouthed off so he wouldn’t look at Becky,” Steve amended, and swallowed down his disgust. “She packed her dresses in your knapsack and wore pants at home, stayed in your bed even after they bought one just for her.”

“Becky was smart,” Bucky said, milder than Steve’s spitting rage. Bucky had always coped with injustice better than Steve ever could. “But not smart enough to stop him. You stopped him.”

Steve blushed. He had lost his fair share of fights, as a kid, but even he had been too smart to pick a fight with an ox of a man like Bucky’s Uncle Joe. Instead, he’d snuck into the rail yard, hid his bright hair under a cap and squirreled tools into his holey pockets, a few more every day until someone finally noticed. Until someone told the foreman, and they found every last tool in the jacket Joseph O’Brien had hung on his hook. Found more besides, a bottle of gin Steve’s neighbor Mr. Malone had forgotten he owned, and a few hints that the railroad wasn’t the only organization paying slippery Joe.

The Prohibition cops had called Joe’s arrest the biggest bust of the year, though Joe swore up and down he didn’t know anything about midnight deliveries at the docks. Bucky’s Aunt Mary had moved in with them, and Becky swore she’d never wear trousers again.

“Why did you do that, if we weren’t friends?”

Steve shook his head, lifting one shoulder and keeping his mouth shut. He’d taunted Bucky plenty, in the school yard, given back as good as he got with words and fists and teeth. But Steve was a head shorter than Bucky, and weighed less than Becky’s chemistry book. Bucky was Steve’s to hurt. Bucky was Steve’s.

“You came,” Steve answered, finally, his eyes on the chipped Formica table under his coffee mug. “When Ma died, and it was raining so hard that even the priest stayed inside, you came.”

It had been November, and Sarah Rogers had disappeared from the community over a month before, into the ward. Steve had already caught a cold, and the driving rain wouldn’t help, sheets of it drenching anyone foolish enough to go outside.

The gravediggers had dragged the coffin over the muddy ground, only two of them and no pallbearers to be found. Had been as respectful as they could, before diving back into the dry space of the shed. The priest was just inside, and Mrs. Koenig had already stolen Steve’s key and started feeding him excessively large servings of kugel. Even Dorothy Ann had offered to walk with him to mass that Sunday, and go for milkshakes after. Everyone in Brooklyn had a sympathetic smile, or a comforting word.

Steve had never felt so alone in his life.

Bucky hadn’t offered him anything: not a casserole, or a hug, or the empty promise that one day everything would be fine. He had appeared out of nowhere, hair flattened against his skull, water dripping from his hair and the end of his nose and his fingers, the bottom of his pants completely coated in mud.

He’d knelt beside Steve, close enough for their arms and thighs to brush, for Steve to feel the heat Bucky radiated despite the cold. He’d knelt at Sarah Rogers’s flooded grave and said nothing at all. Then, hours later, when the rain slowed and the street lights came on, he’d tugged gently on Steve’s elbow and walked him silently home, to where Mrs. Koenig waited with a dry towel, hot soup, and loving hands that Steve was too numb to feel.

“You shouldn’t have been alone,” Bucky insisted, then frowned, and shook the words away. “You weren’t alone,” he muttered, but still seemed displeased. “It was _more_ ,” he finally declared, meeting Steve’s gaze. “It was _always_ more.”

“True,” Steve agreed, because he'd forgotten just as much as the museum - but Bucky remembered all the childhood glances that Steve had lost in his grief. There had been evil uncles and dying mothers, but there had been a million smaller times in between, when Bucky picked a fight with Steve before the MacPhersons could, when Steve had watched Bucky nick an entire pork loin and hadn’t said a word. When Bucky shot up by a foot and girls started _noticing_ him, and Steve had tripped him on the way down the front steps just so Bucky would remember he was there. When Bucky saw Steve at the Stark Expo, a girl on each arm when Steve’s date had ditched him for _Dorothy Ann_ , and he grinned like a shark and bet Steve a whole dollar that Bucky could whup his ass pitching balls at milk bottles. Bucky had won, and had been so busy making fun of Steve that he’d never seemed to notice his dates had found their own ways home.

“It was still me,” Bucky decided, nodding, and it was Steve’s turn to look confused. “That you meant to rescue, in Italy. It wasn’t the 107th; it was me.”

Steve laughed. He couldn’t help it, snorting giggles through his nose and into his hands. “It was _always_ you, Buck,” he gasped, amused and relieved and somehow the sun was rising through the diner window and Bucky was still there and still talking and they’d finally found something real in the legends of their lives. “From that awful day in first grade until you di – until I thought I’d lost you, and even after that. It’s always been you.”

“Nobody but me,” Bucky said, the words an odd counterpoint to the _o k_ he kept tapping on Steve’s open palm. “Nobody gets to kill you but me.”

“That was much more romantic before I dropped you off a mountain and you shot me,” Steve groaned, because that was _not_ the declaration of love it had seemed when they were both stupid GIs riding high on adrenaline and youth.

“You agreed to marry me,” Bucky recalled, the corners of his lips curling in what was almost a smile.

“Not true,” Steve disagreed, then nearly fainted at the hint of mirth in light blue eyes. Bucky had been healing all along. Had been waiting for Steve every night at the museum, to promise him that the things it never mentioned- the fights, the kisses pressed into bruised lips -were still true. “I promised to throw all our crockery at you until a piece of our best china finally did you in,” he grumbled. “There was nothing in there about marrying. Anyway, we’re not the marrying sort.”

“We were happy?” Bucky told him, but his voice rose at the end, and he stared hard at Steve’s palm like it would hold the key to his past.

“According to the Smithsonian,” Steve said, eyebrows raised doubtfully. “I tried to shoot you out of a tree, once, when you fired off a flare to call my bluff about fighting Hydra on my own. You cost us a fortune when you dumped what smelled like the entire bar on my head, because I spent too long watching Agent Carter walk away.”

“I told Dorothy Ann that if she kissed you, she’d never see her cat again,” Bucky confessed, looking far more bashful than he ought to, telling young girls things like that. Bucky’s shoulders had relaxed for the first time since they’d found him, tension Steve hadn’t realized came from trying to remember a past that they hadn’t lived.

“I dumped an entire bottle of Ma’s perfume on your coat one winter, so that girls started coughing if they got too close. She nearly skinned me alive for that.” Steve blushed, thinking of the scarf Bucky had wound around his nose and mouth to stand the smell of his only good coat, of Mary Jean Wiggins who had found a new fella by spring.

“We were happy,” Bucky said again, sounding more assured, and he didn’t flinch when Steve wove their fingers together and let Bucky tap familiar letters out against his hand.

They stayed in their booth, disheveled and bleary-eyed as the sun rose outside; and this time, when Bucky went for Steve’s water straw, Steve was ready for the war.

The waitress charged them extra, when she saw the broken plates.


End file.
